At Music for my Mind as you know we love music: the sounds that we hear throughout a lifetime that deeply influence our characters and our memories. But, more and more, music isn’t just sound but sight as well…

Music videos are nowadays a massive part of the music production industry, with songs’ lyrics containing narratives designed for a visual interpretation. But their history is far older than it may seem. The earliest music video was commissioned by the sheet music producers Marks and Stern in 1894, and consisted of a magic lantern display accompanied by their new hit ‘The Little Lost Child’ as a new way of advertising. 

After the ‘talkies’ came in in the 1920s, music and image continued to collaborate, all the way through to the feature length mock documentaries of The Beatles’ Hard Day’s Night in 1964 and the bizarre masterpiece of The Who’s Tommy in 1975. With the advent of TV, and especially the American channel MTV, the visual element of a new hit song was inseparable from the sound of the song itself. Far more than just advertising, it was now a fully-fledged medium, with directors, producers and enormous budgets. The most expensive of all was in 1995, where Michael and Janet Jackson’s Scream used a whopping $7 million to get their sound across. 

And we will leave you with what was the first music video, shown on MTV in the US, on 1st August 1981, aptly titled ‘Video Killed The Radio Star’ by The Buggles.